In 1980, when my mother co-owned an art gallery in San Francisco, she and her assistant were robbed at gunpoint by two jittery escaped convicts, who mistook the gallery for a cash business and openly discussed shooting them when the cash failed to materialize. The ordeal ended without serious harm (thanks to the miraculous arrival of a delivery man, who frightened the convicts away), but my mother never again wanted to wear the skirt she’d had on that day: a long black wraparound with a geometric pattern of magenta flowers and thick green stems. I appropriated the skirt, cut it short, took it with me to college, and wore it through my twenties. I never forgot its awful history; on the contrary, that history sharpened my pleasure in wearing it. The very act of tying the skirt around my waist felt restorative—as if, by paving over my mother’s horrific experience with ordinary life, I were repairing an imbalance.

In the early nineties, when I reached the point of having no money at all, I began to borrow people’s houses. The first house I sat belonged to a professor at my alma mater. He and his wife were afraid that their son, a student at the college, would throw parties in their absence, and so they urged me to consider the house my private and exclusive home. This was already something of a struggle, because it’s in the nature of a borrowed house that its closets will be hung with someone else’s bathrobes, its refrigerator glutted with someone else’s condiments, its shower drain plugged with someone else’s hair. And when, inevitably, the son showed up at the house and began to run around barefoot, and then invited his friends over and partied late into the night, I felt sick with powerlessness and envy. I must have been a repellent spectre of silent grievance indeed, because one morning, in the kitchen, without my having said a word, the son looked up from his bowl of cold cereal and brutally set me straight: “This is my house, Jonathan.”

I met Christine at a bus stop. We both carried violas. Not just nerds but black nerds, female viola-playing black nerds. Christine was at least discreet: wasp-waisted Nigerian form neat in sensible skirt suits. I had less instinct for self-preservation. One red shoe, one white, a red shirt, a white skirt, and a red-and-white tartan beret. For this ensemble I took abuse from four Jamaican girls in the back seat who found everything I did and wore and said offensive to reason:

At seventeen, I decided to read everything in my school’s library, starting with “A” and ending with “Z.” The library was lodged on the west side of a twelfth-century castle in Wales. The castle, restored in the nineteen-twenties by William Randolph Hearst, was a boarding school. The years: 1964 through 1966. The students came from all parts of the world, though mostly from former British Commonwealth countries. The founders—a hardy, idealistic lot, all of whom had survived the Second World War and felt strongly that such bloodthirsty inanity must never be repeated—believed that if young men were gathered from all corners of the globe and passed their formative years together they could never again be goaded into slaughtering one another.